Electronic discussion rooms have existed in the electronic domain for quite some time. Historically they were called Bulletin Board Systems (or usually just BBSs). Following BBSs came internet news, and more recently forums have been introduced. Each implementation provides a variety of features, but all retain at their core the ability for some individual to start a conversation thread and others to contribute to that conversation. These forums provide a useful gathering point for informal topic-based discussions. They often suffer, though, from the fact that conversations can often meander given their distributed production sources. Allowing a large group to contribute to a conversation inevitably results in contributions by unqualified individuals, producing a sometimes very low signal to noise ratio. One approach to solving this problem resulted in the concept of a moderated forum, with one individual (or a small group) qualified to approve postings to the forum.
In contrast, knowledgebases are typically seeded using pieces of information that may be filtered through a knowledge engineer and there is typically little interaction with actual end-users of the knowledgebase. This means that the knowledgebase may be biased by the knowledge engineer's perspective, and the production of the content may create a comparatively heavy workload to the knowledge engineer as compared to the distributed production of content in a forum.